[google] How Google Grows…and Grows…and Grows — profile of Google. ‘…the difference between 0.3 seconds and 0.2 seconds is pretty profound. Most searches on Google actually take less than 0.2 seconds. That extra tenth of a second is all about the outliers: queries crammed with unrelated words or with words that are close in meaning. The outliers can take half a second to resolve — and Google believes that users’ productivity begins to wane after 0.2 seconds. So its engineers find ways to store ever-more-arcane Web-text snippets on its servers, saving the engine the time it takes to seek out phrases when a query is made. And it’s why, most of the time, the Google home page contains exactly 37 words. “We count bytes,” says Google Fellow Urs Holzle, who is on leave from the University of California at Santa Barbara. “We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages.”‘
Google Profile
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2003 at 10:46 am and is filed under Google, Tech.
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